IT’S IG NOBEL PRIZE time again! Officially the “33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony” rewards researchers in ten categories for presenting “things that make people laugh, then think.”
I like the ordering: Laugh, then think. Here are tidbits on the 2023 Ig Nobels. I’ve saved my favorite for last.
Chemistry/Geology. Licking rocks. Because wet specimens are easier to identify.
Mechanical Engineering. Reanimating dead spiders to test their grip. They’re able to grasp objects up to 130 percent their own weight. (The dead spiders; not the researchers.)
Public Health. Developing analytic (no pun intended) tools for investigating human feces. Apparently we each have unique “analprints.” Move along, folks; there’s nothing to see.
Communication. Studying mental activities of those who are experts at speaking backwards. On a related noted, I continue to delight in Ginger Rogers’ Pig Latin rendition of “We’re In the Money” in Gold Diggers of 1933.
Medicine. Exploring whether cadavers have equal amounts of hair in each nostril. Average left nostril: 120 hairs; average right nostril: 112. I wonder if they accounted for humans alternating nostril use?
Nutrition. Determining whether electrified chopsticks and drinking straws change taste. The findings: Yes, things taste more salty.
Education. Analyzing the boredom of teachers and students. Now what’s that calc problem again?
Psychology. Studying why people look up when others around them do. There’s got to be something up there, right?
Physics. Measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by sexual activity of anchovies. Uh, I’ll pass on tonight’s Puttanesca, thanks.
Literature. My fav. Studying sensations of people who repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many times. According to CNN, it’s a phenomenon called “jamais vu, the experience of finding a familiar thing unfamiliar, in the repetition of language. The researchers found that about two-thirds of people reported feeling ‘peculiar’ when they repeated the same word about 30 times.”
Personally, my limit is around 17 times, after which I start giggling and thinking there must be a better way to earn spare change.
It does remind me of the time I laughed and laughed at a Donna Reed movie on the telly. This incident was enhanced by the fact that we didn’t have a TV on St. Thomas at the time. We did have ganja. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023